


Found Family

by madwriteson



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Character Study, Found Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:49:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27578095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madwriteson/pseuds/madwriteson
Summary: A bit of musing on the characters of Renée Minkowski and Doug Eiffel, and their relationship.
Relationships: Doug Eiffel & Renée Minkowski
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23





	Found Family

Renée Minkowski was an only child.

Where other singletons might have made up for their lack of siblings by becoming close to their cousins—if family was nearby—or by making close friends with other children their age, Renée could not. Not to say that she didn’t try; while her family still lived in Europe, she had managed both for a while.

And then they left.

Young Renée tried not to resent her parents for dragging her to the other side of the globe. She was just old enough to understand the barest outlines of the disarray that the dissolution of communist states was causing, enough to almost understand why her parents found the prospect of life in the United States more promising. And even Renée had been full of hope, at least at the beginning.

But it turned Renée into a stranger in a strange land at a very young age, took her away from her friends and made it hard, so hard to make new ones. Even when she had shed the last obvious vestiges of her accent, she was skittish and scared, afraid to open up to new people, afraid they would discover her origins. After all, “Communist” was still an insult those days, even if she had been too young at the time to know what it meant to be one.

All three of them assimilated hard, adopting every new American custom they came across with great enthusiasm, her father in particular. The Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas… all celebrated with an urgency to them, a need to put up a facade that said “Look at us. Aren’t we normal? Aren’t we the most _normal_ family you’ve ever seen?”

They were never quite treated as one.

The Air Force helped. It gave her discipline, gave her drive, gave her purpose. Made her one among many, made her the _same_. Following orders came naturally; protecting those she commanded came even more so. But those were relationships within a defined hierarchy. She knew her place in relation to each person around her, each according to their rank, and as long as orders were followed, she always would.

When she married Dominik, she found herself unaccountably frightened of his family. Large, boisterous, five siblings who all teased each other mercilessly, acts which made Renée so viscerally uncomfortable to observe that she had needed to walk out of a few family dinners.

Dominik had never blamed her for it, but one way or another, she stopped being invited to those dinners.

All this to say, Renée Minkowski had no experience of siblings. So when, at the grand old age of almost 35, the universe finally decided to present her with an annoying little brother, she had neither the understanding to recognize him for what he was, nor the tools to cope with his ability to annoy her in ways that no one else could quite manage.

Doug Eiffel had spent his entire life searching for a family. His parents, gone when he was too young to really remember them, though whether they had died or had surrendered him to foster care when they hadn’t been able to cope any more, he didn’t know and didn’t care to find out. After all, if they were still alive, they hadn’t wanted him; why should he want them?

Foster home after foster home never quite became a real home, and adoption… well, Doug had always had more energy than he had known what to do with. Acting out came easily to him, and who wanted the noisy kid with behavioral issues when they could have a kid who knew how to sit down and shut up when told to?

And the foster homes weren’t so bad. Maybe most of them took a “plop everyone in front of a tv to shut them up” approach to childcare, but that exposure to pop culture managed to civilize Doug Eiffel, after a fashion. And while the other kids stuck in the foster system with him weren’t exactly his siblings, they’d still let him bum cigarettes off of them, would still pass that contraband bottle of liquor that someone had smuggled in to help everyone pass the long weekend nights when curfew had them trapped in their rooms.

So Doug grew up, after a fashion. Learned to live in society, learned how to bend just enough to pretend he was keeping to the rules and restrictions of adulthood. Not enough that he didn’t chafe against the rules and regulations of the air force, but still, it was the closest he had come to what he was looking for. The camaraderie was almost like a family, and he found a vocation in the communications work he was given. And, well, if the regulations he had to abide by wrapped a little too tight around him some days, there was always alcohol to dull the pain of it.

And then he met Kate, and for a little while he thought that this was it, this was the rest of his life, safe and secure in this little family he’d made, with a woman he wasn’t quite sure he knew and a daughter he adored beyond belief.

But all those little addictions and indulgences that had made life tolerable before lingered, and he found out that Kate wasn’t willing to tolerate a man in her life who came home from work and worked his way methodically through a six pack.

That just made him turn to hard liquor, hidden from her sight, made him ruin his own goddamn life and lose what he thought had been his one chance. One chance to have a family, one chance to find what he’d been looking for all his life, one chance to be _worth_ something.

All this to say, Doug Eiffel had no idea what it meant to be a part of a family. So when the universe presented him with a strict older sister, he did not understand that no matter how she nagged, no matter how she insulted, she would always, _always_ have his back when he was in trouble.

No matter how many times he fucked up.


End file.
